Font Ligatures and Unicodes Again

[homespuncottage]

I swear I have a block when it comes to getting the ligatures to show in the design tool. I have "Just married" and font manager shows me the unicode UT0041 for the w with the swirlies. So how do I get the actual font as it shows in my font manager to show in the design tool? I tried the obvious, copying and pasting but that didn't work. It used to work with Blooming before it was taken down. Thank you for your patience. I know these questions have been asked a million times. It would just be faster if I didn't have to do all of my script fonts in photoshop, export the text and bring it into the design tool, plus the client can't edit it. Thank you so much. 

Bev

[Cat]

I don't use Photoshop, so I'm not sure what the font manager is, but I just copy/paste the character itself (not the unicode number) into a Zazzle text box. As long as you have the font of the text box set correctly, it should show up just fine. 

[homespuncottage]

Hi @Cat,  I misspoke, it sss macs native font book. You copy the ligature from your pc into the text box in the design tool?

[Cat]

Correct. Just like I'd copy the letter "a" or something. So here's a capital letter "W" with a tail in Just Marriage:  Here are the lower case ones:   You just can't see the letters here because the font used for the forum here doesn't know how to interpret that particular character.

IMHO the easiest way to deal with ligatures in Zazzle is to create a "cheat sheet" that has all of the special characters for each font. Here's an example that another designer did: Ellizabeth Font Ligatures Chart | Zazzle

You can take that chart, highlight all of the special characters and change the font to another one so you can see what special characters that particular font has assigned to those codes.

I have them for the fonts I regularly use, although mine are a sloppy mess compared to that one. Basically, Unicode is the way the computer knows which character you're referring to. The vast majority of unicode characters are the same across all fonts - so a lower case "a" is a lowercase "a" no matter what font you're using. But the special characters like the letters with swashes live in the "private use section" of the unicode chart: Private Use Area — Unicode Character Table (jrgraphix.net)

In that section, the characters are not fixed like they are in other sections of the unicode chart - the font developer can put whatever they want into those characters - and they're not going to be the same from font to font. So the way I made my charts was to go through that unicode chart and to copy/paste each of those little rectangles into a Zazzle design and then set the font to Elizabeth, or Just Marriage, or whatever, so I could see what the authors of those fonts stuck into each character. I don't happen to have all of those fonts installed on my PC, so I can't see them except for in the Zazzle tool.

Hope that helps and makes sense.

[homespuncottage]

@Cat , you are a Godsend. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to explain this all to me. For some reason, I just couldn't wrap my head around it. The information that you provided as well as the resources are an immense help. Thank you again!

[Cat]

You're welcome! Glad my blathering was of some help!

[Cat]

Here's one of my cheat sheets: Wandella Script Special Characters Poster | Zazzle Not as fancy as the other designer did, I didn't bother to include the unicode numbers, but I separated out each character into a separate text box. If you want to use it, please feel free. You can highlight all of the characters and then change the font to Just Marriage, or whatever font you want to use, so you can see what's in each of those characters in each font - I didn't do the entire private use section, so there may be other characters that I didn't uncover, but this covers most of them.

To use it, just choose the character in question, hit "edit text" and then copy the little rectangle out of the text box and paste it into your own project. Hope that makes sense.

[homespuncottage]

Perfect. Thank you for sharing.